Anomalous zone. Russia

A story about the history of a subscriber with the nickname Mr. Rusvector . Pavlov, a Siberian, wrote the books Overcoming Fear (2022), Incredible Mysticism (2022).

We have a lot of places in Siberia that are quite mysterious, and even scary. In the middle of the last century, when I was a kid, I heard from my grandmother a story about how, outside the village near Minusinsk, in which she was born, one such place was discovered by chance. There are cattle there, and perhaps people have disappeared without a trace.

Grandma, God rest her soul, told this not to me, but to her friends who came to visit in the evening. They started talking about the wonderful, the unknown. At first I thought it was a fairy tale, but it turned out to be a terrible story. They were having tea, and I was lying on the Russian stove. It was stuffy, I couldn't sleep and couldn't help listening to what they were talking about.

I remember it was a warm August, permeating the air with the fragrant spirit of meadow grasses, freshly mown hay, the spicy aroma of apples, the warmth of fresh milk. I'm lying on the stove, wrapped in its unforgettable smell. Anyone who has ever visited these warm palms in his life will never forget the mixture of aromas of dried herbs, pastries, felt boots, sheepskin coat and many other things characteristic of a home in the Russian countryside.

And now the girlfriends are sitting near the samovar, listening to their grandmother. They don't pay attention to me, they say, they don't understand anything, I'm still young. And I'm lying quietly, holding my breath, and what I've heard makes my skin crawl.

Well, after a long winter, the village cattle are taken to pasture early in the morning, and the shepherd, who is chosen by the residents themselves from among the honest and non-drinkers, grazes that cattle all day, drives them to the village in the evening, and the owners sort out the yards.

Once a shepherd drove a lowing herd from the fields, but one cow did not return from grazing to the owner's yard. The owner of the Burenka, of course, to the shepherd with a complaint:

"Where did you put my wet nurse, you idiot?"

And his hands are shaking, there is fear in his eyes, his teeth are chattering. In short, a natural fright that cannot be faked.

He swears that what happened was not his fault. He suffered such fear himself that his knees are still shaking. He says he saw with his own eyes how a cow was grazing at the edge of the herd, but began to disappear into thin air as it moved. The head, neck, forelegs, trunk, tail— and the whole gradually evaporated completely.

A bug, a shepherd dog reacted to what was happening and fearlessly rushed after the cattle, but also disappeared without a trace. The shepherd says, when he saw such a devilry, at first he was numb with fear. I didn't understand what to do. And when he came to himself from horror, he went to the place where the animals had disappeared, making the sign of the cross.

He says there's nothing strange to see from the side, but if you look straight at it, it looks like a ghostly arch. The air in it is thick, fluctuating, vibrating. He began to call his dog, but did not even hear a bark in response.

This unusual event excited all the villagers, and divided them into two camps. Some did not believe the words of the shepherd, demanded to punish him and recover the value of the missing cattle. Others recalled that in the vicinity of the village, people had repeatedly disappeared without a trace. At first they sinned against robbers, and now they assumed, or maybe they disappeared in this perilous place? In the end, it was decided, we need to go and check the suspect's story on the spot.

The shepherd brought them to the pasture, showed them where, indeed, something incomprehensible was happening to the air: it was trembling and dense, cloudy. They were amazed. It got creepy. They decided not to harass the animals for the test. But they just went to that place and began to throw stones at it first, then sticks. Everything that was thrown disappeared literally on the fly. They even tied sticks to a rope, but after the throw, only a part of the rope remained in the hand, and the one that crossed the invisible border disappeared.

No one knows what kind of phenomenon it was, but they called it a cursed place, and since then they have been avoiding that clearing for a mile. Cattle began to be driven out to a new pasture.

I didn't understand everything at the end, but it seems that some scientific people came later. They took them to a place and there they talked among themselves that this was the entrance to another world, or somewhere else. Grandma did not understand everything, but she remembered several cases when people disappeared without a trace and they could not be found. Also, this hole probably swallowed up, but they couldn't tell people about it anymore. He says the years have passed since then, but the fear of this gloomy place among the villagers has not gone away.

I heard the story in the late 50s, when my grandmother was already in her late seventies. It turns out that these events took place long before the war and the revolution of 1917. Old people say that creepy things generally happen on the threshold of scary events. It's like a sign to people to prepare for the ordeal.